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You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist is a podcast for seekers, dreamers, and questioners that intimately explores the human experience. Your host, Stephanie Winn, distills years of wisdom gained from her practice as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. She invites guests from a broad variety of disciplines and many walks of life, including researchers, writers, artists, healers, advocates, inventive outliers, and creative geniuses. Together, they investigate, illuminate, and inspire transformation - in the self, relationships, and society. Curious about many things, Stephanie’s uniquely interdisciplinary psychological lens tackles challenging social issues while encouraging personal and relational wellness. Join this journey through the inner wilderness.
Swell AI Transcript: 133. Andrew Zywiec FINAL.mp3
Andrew Zywiec:
We know that almost all of these patients' gender dysphoria does not exist in a vacuum. It's a trauma response. Anxiety, depression, PTSD, history of sexual trauma, or abuse, those things need to be heavily addressed. I see a lot of gender dysphoria as a trauma outlet. Once they do one thing, they have to jump to the next. Once they get a mastectomy, that's not good enough. Then they have to get bottom surgery. Once they get bottom surgery, there will be something after that. The buck won't stop there. So there's a lot of different things that we can do, but I think that we have to root it in being honest and being truthful. And that starts with having difficult discussions, difficult conversations. It needs to be squashed. It needs to be completely extinguished. So anything that we can do, we should be doing.
Stephanie Winn: You must be some kind of therapist. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Andrew Zywiec. That's right, Zivjats. Did I get that right? That's correct. Okay, that's a mouthful. We practiced it beforehand. I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Andrew Zivjats. He is a medical doctor in Florida, a licensed tribal practitioner. We're going to talk about what that means in a moment. and a researcher. We originally connected on X because he is one of those brave doctors who's not afraid to speak out about some of the scandals happening in the medical field right now, like those done in the name of so-called gender affirmation, for example. So I'm excited to pick his brain today about topics such as how to find a trustworthy doctor, and what is going on in the medical field, and what a more ethical approach to treatment of complex conditions might look like. So, Andrew Zivjats, welcome. Thank you for joining me.
Andrew Zywiec: Thanks so much for having me.
Stephanie Winn: All right, so before we start recording, we were talking about what medical doctor means, what licensed tribal practitioner means. And just to kind of cue my audience up, I want to frame the issue as it shows up in my life, which is that I talk to a lot of concerned parents, specifically parents of trans-identified youth who do not know where they can find a trustworthy doctor. And the ones I meet who do find trustworthy doctors, usually those doctors don't take insurance. They're often operating on a concierge basis. And many of them, like you, are in private practice and or considered a licensed tribal practitioner. So as we're exploring how do people find trustworthy doctors, can you explain what some of these terms mean and how they influence the position a doctor might have on some issues or the broader social issues influencing that doctor and their ability to practice?
Andrew Zywiec: Sure. So I guess we could just start with the ground up and talk about what the path to becoming a physician or a medical doctor is. Right. So generally speaking, everybody does four years of undergrad. And usually that's in a STEM program, but not necessarily all the time. And then four years of medical school. After four years of medical school, you can graduate with a D.O., an M.D. or an N.D. right, naturopathic doctor, osteopathic doctor, and medical doctor. And MD and DO are extremely similar. One of them has a little bit more of a holistic approach. But at this point in time, we can say that apples to apples pretty much. And then naturopaths obviously don't interact really with pharma and things of that nature. Now, after your medical doctorate and after you obtain your MD, you generally have to do either an internship or a residency. Most residency programs are around three years long. Some of them are a little bit longer, five years. And then beyond that, some people subspecialize and do fellowships. Now, after one year of medical training, you can go and get your state license in general practice and do as you see fit. But At this point in time, anybody with a state allopathic medical license is beholden to the CDC, the FDA, to the standards of care that are listed in things like the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, so forth and so on. For myself, for a lot of functional doctors, for some integrative physicians, for a lot of more holistically inclined physicians, we choose to go with different routes. For me personally, I decided to go and get licensed through the tribal nations. The indigenous in this country have always had their own independent medical practice and they are not beholden to the major system out there. So it allows you to practice as you see fit with your patients with a little bit more flexibility in how you treat. A lot of doctors currently have been losing their licenses, coming under significant scrutiny and fire for simple things such as not affirming people's genders, not being pro-vaccine with the COVID shots and those mandates. And we've seen a lot of lawfare waged against physicians. So there's a couple of different things. And then there's obviously non-clinical medical doctors as well. people that work within the legal system, people that work within the research fields, but not, but don't necessarily interact with patients.
Stephanie Winn: All right. So you chose to become a licensed tribal practitioner to give you the freedom Could we say to follow your conscience, to treat patients according to the best of your knowledge and not be beholden to these so-called standards of care set by institutions that many people have lost trust in?
Andrew Zywiec: Yeah, I think that's that's a fair assessment. You know, after being in you know, I was in I was in medical residency for about three years in pediatric medicine. And my focus, the things that I was most interested in were emergency medicine and neonatal intensive care. Those were the two places where I saw myself moving in the future. And I think that there is a lot of utility in emergency services and some surgical areas of allopathic medicine, but from the most part of of what I saw in my professional career, I disagreed with most treatments. For me, it's not just gender-affirming care that went off a cliff. It's the vast majority of things that it's just pharmaceutical treatment. You come into your doctor, your doctor's not concerned with getting to a root cause analysis. Your doctor's not concerned with spending significant time with you. They're not concerned with discussing Very basic medicine like diet, exercise, mitigating stress responses, you know, sunshine, things like that. Just really basic stuff. They're not considering that. It's all about, you know, what drug am I going to prescribe you today? What algorithm am I going to use to get to a diagnosis? And then that diagnosis has a list of medications that I should go with. And that model, that cookie cutter model of medicine, was very off-putting and did not result in good patient outcomes. So I generally am not a big fan of any of the allopathic model.
Stephanie Winn: As I was saying before we started recording, I hear from a lot of mental health practitioners who have faced similar dilemmas in their journey of pursuing a license to practice in the field of psychology as you faced in pursuing the medical field. So it really seems like there are some parallels there. You know, for those who are just bewildered and flummoxed by why doctors are just rubber stamping these horrific so-called treatments, can you explain what you understand about these boards that set the rules and the standards of care? How are they being influenced? How are they being compromised?
Andrew Zywiec: Well, I mean, it's there, there's a lot to unpack, I think, with that question. I certainly don't have all the answers. But in my opinion, first and foremost, a lot of what's happened in medicine over, I don't know how long, but since certs, it's become very algorithmic, right? And they don't, they're not teaching people to think critically. And they're not teaching people to get to to get to root diagnoses to help. And I think part of that is that we we have a sick care model. I'm sure that you've heard that. I'm sure that most of your listeners have probably heard of that. If you consider medicine to be a business, and you remove morality, and you remove altruism, and you look at it as a monetary system, then all of this begins to make more sense. It's a lot more profitable to have an ill population that needs to come to you, and you are dispensing not knowledge or education on how to better yourself or to heal, but you are dispensing things that they need to pick up at a pharmacy or at a drugstore. So what I see in the medical model is disease creation and illness perpetuation. And I see that for profit. So in my opinion, it's not a corrupted system and it's not a broken system. The system's operating exactly as it was designed to operate. And it's operating quite efficiently and effectively for what it deems as a good system. I think if you look back at the history of medicine, which is Rockefeller, Right, Rockefeller really kind of bought out the medical industry around 1910. He paid a a hefty price to slander all the naturopaths, to shut down all the osteopathic physicians, to silence thousands of years of medicine. He, you know, privatized the AMA. The Flexner Report directly told physicians, do not look for underlying illness, treat the symptoms right in front of you. And when you think about what that does in terms of medicine, is it's a quick fix, but it gets people to believe that you're helping them and you're healing them. If you can fix the symptom that they're experiencing in that moment, or at that time, then there's a lot of utility in doing that for for the patient feels like you have actually healed them. Now, they told patients directly in Flexner not to not to look for root causes, because that's not your that's not your job. And that's been so allopathic medicine has only been around for 114 years, give or take. And since the advent of that model, we have the sickest society in almost all First World nations. We spent, I think, $5 trillion on our medical system last year. And we have, once again, maybe the most ill, most chronically ill population in a First World nation across the world. You know, the cancer industry maybe is the best example of that. We've spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the course of 30 years. We've increased life expectancy by less than four months. And chemotherapeutics have about a 97.5% kill rate, meaning the medications actually kill you. So, you know, what does that really sound like to you? To me, it sounds like money laundering. It doesn't sound like a medical system that's built and designed to heal. And from a research perspective as well, somebody who spent years working at a lab bench, I've seen the same thing in research. A lot of these places are operating from a publish it or perish perspective. And if you are not feeding into the system that is designed, you will get weeded out of the system because it's not designed for you. So I think that those are a couple places where you say, quote unquote, corrupted. Once again, I think it's designed this way, but we can call it corruption. And once again, the diligent little soldiers are the doctors on the front lines. I've noticed that if you ask most doctors very basic questions about the things that they prescribe, they don't have a lot of answers. If you ask somebody about what, ask them what five, what five ingredients in a vaccine are. Name five significant adverse reactions to a vaccine and what are some predisposing conditions that would lead to those possible reactions? They'll have no answer. And once again, it's taught into people. They don't teach the biochemistry or the immunology behind vaccines. They teach the heroes of the movement that changed the world and came up with these brilliant things. So it's all kind of designed in this fashion.
Stephanie Winn: I'd like to start with some basics for the non-medical listeners in our audience, non-medical professionals, which is most people, and break down some terms that people have probably heard before, but if they're not in your field or mine, might not really understand what these terms are. So if you don't mind kind of going back to basics, the term standard of care has come up a couple of times already. Could you explain to the audience what a standard of care is?
Andrew Zywiec: So it's a little bit different now as well. The standard of care used to be what the general physician would do in this scenario. Let's say you went to court because something went wrong. They would ask a panel of experts, essentially, like, is this the standard? Is this what any general physician would do in this situation? Does this have utility? And does it have backing? Now, standard of care has kind of shifted. Now, I keep using this word algorithmic, and that's because I don't want to overuse the term, but if you know what an algorithm is, it's if A, then B, if B, then A and B, and you can trace your way down algorithms. That's how standard of care is now kind of applied. For instance, the standard of care for, let's just use the example of transgenderism. Now, transgenderism historically affected about 0.01% of the population, so a very small subset. If it was seen in pediatric medicine, it usually affected young females, prepubescent. By the time they went through puberty, all of those things were generally resolved in over 80%. And when it affected adults, which is the population that it generally stuck with, the standard of care was cognitive behavioral therapy. Now, after cognitive behavioral therapy, if that didn't work, then they considered things like social transitioning to ease mental burden, they considered things like hormones, and at the very end, you know, the scalpel being the very last thing that any doctor should lean towards was a ditch last effort kind of thing. Now the standard of care is simply to affirm. So the standard of care has now changed from what the general doctor would do into what do the guidelines say about this? What does this group or this body in particular say about this? The people who write a lot of the transgender guidelines is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which is WPATH. that, which has been shown, obviously, to been flying by the seat of their pants and not have any clinical evidence for anything that they're using. So a lot of these things, even the standards of care that used to operate off of evidence and off of a collective, now have been kind of captured by small minority groups that are kind of touting themselves as experts.
Stephanie Winn: Yeah, I like how you broke that down, because when you described the phrase I guess the evolution of the meaning of the phrase over time, when I hear that general care practitioner being brought in front of a panel of peers and the peers being asked, is this how you would all handle this situation? What that's really based on is years of training and experience, which evolve into a certain intuition that a person has from that role of expertise as to… And I'm imagining like Occam's razor fits in, right? In the sense that if you've treated thousands of patients over the years and nine out of 10 times that you see this particular cluster of symptoms, this thing ends up being positive on labs, and so the standard of care is to order that particular lab. You develop an intuition based on experience and training. And so I am hearing sort of this holistic approach in that, that it really takes both the knowledge and the intuition that develops from experience. Absolutely. Whereas the way you described how the standard of care has evolved is it really… Is a departure from intuition. And when I think about how that applies to something like my field and our understanding of the standard of care. Similarly, there is an intuition that you develop from being a therapist with years of experience and training where you start to get a hunch. You're not sure that your hunch is correct, but it becomes refined over time with experience that, you know, I'm kind of picking up on something going on in the ballpark of maybe we need to explore what's going on with this patient's father. You know, like you could just get those hunches, right? Yeah. And so that's what standard of care used to mean. It's an intuition thing combined with experience. And now there's this top-down approach of these fake authorities like WPATH. where they're telling people to override their intuition, disconnect from your own body's wisdom, disconnect from what you know about human nature, what you know about the body or the mind, and follow this manualized approach because it's what's done. And then people are sold these ridiculous ideas. like the idea that gender affirming care saves lives, which is actually the opposite of the truth, right? It literally shortens lives. It increases the risk of suicide and all cause mortality. So it really feels like a disconnect from wisdom and intuition.
Andrew Zywiec: What it is, it's it's a separation from critical thinking. And that's, you know, that it's a 1984 Orwellian style of looking at things where do not believe your eyes believe what we tell you. And and you're absolutely right when you say it's a departure from you know, from from wisdom and from knowledge. Because as I said, it removes all critical thinking from the picture. This is the algorithm I know doctors that will not they can't diagnose strep throat without their tests and without their labs and without you don't need labs and tests for everything, actually. And, you know, I had the opportunity to study in two different foreign countries and see two completely different healthcare systems, one in one near South America and one in Europe. and they're a lot less inclined to order imaging or to order lab work or blood work because if you don't need it, you don't need it. But yes, we've seen these small organizations claim to be experts and then push things that are, and the point is obviously untrue things. No one in their right mind could say from a research perspective that you can prove that this thing stops somebody from committing suicide. You know, when a patient comes in, And they've been told to do this by social media influencers and things like this to threaten suicide. Now, the old standard of care, we'll use that, the old standard of care was to put that patient in a psych ward for a 72 hour hold. Because if they have a, you know, if they have a real in a real reason for you to be, yeah, you know, like, you're not just somebody says, like, Oh, I wish I want to kill myself or, you know, something like that. you know, something where you start asking about their plan and their insights into it, and they actually, you know, have something more highly evolved, then you would put them in a psychiatric hold in order to ensure over the next 72 hours that their mental status is fine and that they're not actually going to harm themselves or something of that nature. Now it's used as an emotional manipulation, strong arming, in order to get a physician to write a script or to do as somebody wants. That's bad medicine in the first place. The secondary thing is, In what world do we have to be in to realize that carving off a child's reproductive organs is not going to decrease the rate of suicide? They have an entire, now some of the studies, this is another thing where we understand that the whole system is captured. These studies that they do are like 30, 60, 90 day survey studies. You know, like a patient got their puberty blockers and then 30 days later they ask them, are you happy? Well, yeah, it's a child that just got what they wanted. And of course, they're going to say on a survey that they're happy. So they say, Oh, see, look, their patient, this patient's all better. It's the most short sighted thing ever. Now, now, a patient that receives a surgery has an entire lifetime to regret that surgery that they inevitably will, they have to deal with wounds and damages and scars for the rest of their lives. Some of these things will cause chronic issues. Like when I get into the discussions about everything, puberty blockers, to cross-sex hormones, to surgeries, we can walk through all the problems that arrive from all of those different things. All of these medications have profound adverse effects. We have no idea what these things do to the human psyche at a time of, at an important time of neuroendocrine and neurohormonal development and emotional lability and things like that. So We're in a place where, once again, they demand that you trust what they're saying, even though it flies in the face of all logic and reasoning. The last time, by the way, that a surgical methodology was utilized to correct for a mental illness was the transorbital lobotomy. And that won the Nobel Prize in 1959 in science and medicine. That was never taken back. Scientific consensus said it was a great thing if a patient was psychotic and could not be controlled, you could go in, scramble their prefrontal cortex, destroy their executive function, and then when they drool on themselves for the next 50 years, you have been successful. Here's a Nobel Prize. So we've seen medicine be captured in this way before. This is a little bit different though. These are children. And it's destroying their ability to procreate and reproduce, not to mention it is teaching them to hate something immutable about themselves, not something that's even possible to be changed. So there's there's something very insidious and dark that's happening with that in particular. I know I went off on a little bit of tangent.
Stephanie Winn: I apologize, but we're going to define a couple more terms and you are free to go on as many tangents as you want because it's all it's all valuable, I think. But I just had to add, have you heard of the chest dysphoria rating scale?
Andrew Zywiec: The chest dysphoria rating scale. I have not heard of this.
Stephanie Winn: I mean, it's laughable, right? When you talk about these short-term subjective follow-up studies that do not take into consideration that person's entire future, both mentally and physically, and do not take into consideration just what we know about human beings. The chest dysphoria rating scale is one of these things. I would encourage anyone to go ahead and look it up because it's one of the standards that has been used to assess the relative success of a radical elective double mastectomy for healthy young females as a so-called treatment for so-called gender dysphoria. They have them fill out this very specific rating scale about how much they specifically hate their breasts before and after, and if they hate their chest less within a few weeks or months, as you said, after the surgery than it's considered a success. By the way, chest dysphoria is not in the DSM. And everything we do know about dysphoria is A, there's actually no clear distinction between that and body dysmorphia and OCD. If you're a trained therapist with years of experience and you understand how the human mind works, just because those are separate categories in the DSM doesn't mean they are separate psychological phenomena, right? And when it comes to body dysmorphia and obsessive compulsive disorder that's focused on the body, people who have their breasts removed tragically often end up then shifting the target of their self-hatred to their hips or their voice or their height or the width of their shoulders or whatever the next thing is. So I just had to throw in the chest dysphoria rating scale as a perfect example of exactly what you're talking about. Next, I'm going to ask you if you wouldn't mind defining the term medical necessity for our audience.
Andrew Zywiec: Medical necessity in in what in what manner would you like me to say that a medical necessity in my eyes is when something is absolutely necessary in order to save somebody's life. That would that would be necessity in my eyes, but that's coming from somebody who who all of their training was a little bit more fixated towards an emergency situation. You know, we could we could broaden that term, though.
Stephanie Winn: Well, I guess I want to talk about medical necessity not as someone reasonable, like you would define it, but more as it's used in the system and how that term has been manipulated over time and also what this has to do with insurance fraud. That's kind of where I'm going with it.
Andrew Zywiec: Okay, so I mean, a medical medical necessity is what they are using right now and say things like gender affirming care to say this is this is necessary. This is life saving, this is going to drastically reduce morbidity and mortality. Right? That's kind of what they're looking at it in terms of right now. Now, we could broaden the terms of medical necessity. There's a lot of things that we can consider to be absolutely necessary in medicine, ordering certain blood work for this particular scenario where you need to look at these labs. Generally speaking, actually, we operate under a kind of necessity definition in everything that we do. We want to limit any intervention that we are doing in order to do no harm, even putting a needle in a patient for an IV. technically harm. So we want to always minimize that. So medical necessity is don't do anything that is not deemed medically necessary to do in that particular scenario. I don't know where you're going with the insurance aspect of this.
Stephanie Winn: Well, I'm wondering, it's probably because you're independent and you don't work with insurance, right?
Andrew Zywiec: I do not.
Stephanie Winn: I do not.
Andrew Zywiec: And fortunately for myself, as a resident physician, the only insurance issues that come up is like, hey, you need to annotate this differently, or you need to write your note differently, or you need to use this word, not that word, so that they can get their money. But apart from that, no, I don't have to work with insurance.
Stephanie Winn: And when you were in that context, I mean, that was all part of medical necessity. And maybe it was something I had to deal with more in my previous employment, prior job experience before I started private practice and then stopped taking insurance and then stopped providing therapy altogether just to focus on consulting. I think especially for the mental health field, because it's easy, I think, to argue that some of the types of care that you have provided are literally life-saving. It's harder to argue that psychotherapy is medically necessary. It's easy to argue that, sure, yes, if the patient is suicidal and gender, thankfully, is not part of the picture, so they're not threatening that they're going to you know, hurt themselves if they don't get the drugs that they want, you know. In the case of a suicidal patient, it's easy to make the argument for medical necessity, you know, of treatment of their depression. But there's a lot of other things that people see therapists for. An example would be marriage counseling. Is marriage counseling medically necessary? There are therapists who will bill it as family therapy. There are therapists who won't. So medical necessity is a concept that has a lot to do with what insurance is willing to pay for. And when I'm thinking of insurance fraud, which is just something I've been wanting to explain to my audience anyway, and I just figured today would be a good day to do it with you, to talk about insurance fraud, because when people bill insurance under false pretenses, that is insurance fraud, right? So if you're lying about the diagnosis, the treatment, what you did with the patient, or any of that to an insurance company, then that's called insurance fraud. And people do that because of the concept of medical necessity versus what they see as being necessary for the patient. So one way to avoid that ethical dilemma is to operate independently, as you do. and as many therapists do, operating independently of insurance because they don't For many therapists, they don't want to take the low pay that the insurance companies provide, but they also, therapists tend to be pretty holistic thinkers and don't exactly always enjoy the process of writing their notes as if they were going to be scrutinized by an insurance company one day and as if the medical necessity has to be obvious throughout their clinical documentation. A lot of therapists just don't want to deal with that. But I just think these are interesting concepts for the public to be aware of if they're not so informed. because they really kind of shine a light on why the system is so complicated and inefficient, why people are being lied to, why certain practitioners won't take insurance, and all that kind of stuff.
Andrew Zywiec: Yeah, there's a whole convoluted web of things happening behind the scenes, I think, just like any industry. You know, just like any industry. If you don't know what's going on in the auto industry behind the closed doors, then you probably don't know a lot about the auto industry. Medicine's no different, right? There's a million things going on and most people are not privy, unfortunately, to all of them.
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Andrew Zywiec: So they they sign in to be part of the PMA. So they sign in to be part of part of a tribe. And then, yeah, absolutely.
Stephanie Winn: Now they don't have that once.
Andrew Zywiec: Yeah, they don't have to live, you know, you don't have to live on sovereign indigenous ground and your your practice doesn't have to be on tribal ground or anything like that. But it affords you it affords you to be inside of their structure and essentially under their protection. And again, a lot of people don't want their notes in the system. A lot of people don't want their their medical, you know, you as a therapist probably see this a lot. the weaponization of diagnoses, it becomes extreme. You know, when people have a diagnosis of depression or of anxiety or PTSD or of trauma, these things can be heavily weaponized, you know, in the medical system, in the court systems, in custody battles. I mean, these things get weaponized all the time. I think that people really enjoy the fact that once they get into a different system, none of their notes, like the, you know, all of my documentation It's the property of the tribal nations. In order for the government to get their hands on it, they would have to go through the tribal nations to get my laptop. So it offers a profound level of protection for both myself and for the patients as well.
Stephanie Winn: I think I did that once to see a doctor that I wanted to work with that had that license status. And so for patients who aren't familiar, if there was a doctor that they wanted to see as a licensed tribal practitioner, is there a certain website that the patient would go to for this?
Andrew Zywiec: It's just like finding any other practitioner. There's no large database that I think you could scroll through. There might be one somewhere, not to my knowledge. But it'd be just like finding a holistic physician online or something like that.
Stephanie Winn: I mean, not to find the doctor, but let's say they find the doctor that they want to see. And then this doctor says, I'm a licensed tribal practitioner, and I'm going to need you to fill out this form. So who runs the program where the patient would go to enroll into this?
Andrew Zywiec: Depends on what tribe they're licensed through. For me personally, I'm licensed through First Nation Medical Board, which is Crow tribe. They're out of Montana. And so they operate kind of independently. So they have their own medical board and all things go through them. So different tribes, different practices, you know, one is not the same as the other. You know, and that's, it's almost like different state medical boards, even though they kind of operate under one umbrella, you know, they're of their own entities.
Stephanie Winn: Is there anything that you've noticed about what types of doctors gravitate towards doing this kind of work?
Andrew Zywiec: Yeah, absolutely. They're anti system doctors. So, so I the vast majority of physicians that do things like this are they cannot stand vaccines, they cannot stand big pharma, they cannot stand insurance companies breathing down their throats trying to tell them what to do. It's they're the most they're the most holistic and and I would say the best doctors out there. all operate under umbrellas like this. And that's not to say that there's not good doctors in the allopathic world. So I'm not painting everybody with the same brush. But we have to be very, very honest about what's happening in medicine and how long it's been happening. I'm a very young physician. I certainly question all the time how people have allowed vaccines to go on for this long to have this many problems to the point where they have national injury compensation funds, they have entire legal networks and groups of people, you know, for litigation on this. There's entire research groups that are complete even in our government and our DoD dedicated to vaccine injuries like anthrax. Like, how does this information just get covered up for so long? And how do doctors continue to perpetuate the same system? You know, I talk often about statin medications. Statin medications are maybe the highest prescribed drug for cardiovascular health in the country, and they're absolute poison. Like, how has this been happening for so long? So I have little to no faith in most of the allopathic model of medicine at this point. So when you see people that have gotten out of it and shifted away, I tend to hold those people in a little bit higher regard. But I'm probably biased, personally.
Stephanie Winn: OK. So you started to go there, so let's go there. But before we go there, I'm going to give my listeners a little bit of disclaimer. I do not really talk about vaccines on this podcast because I am not a doctor, and I'm not someone who does medical research, except as it interests me. I have been most interested in the scandal known as so-called gender-affirming care, and so that's where I spend the bulk of my research energy. I don't have a strong opinion on vaccines, and I don't plan on forming a strong opinion, unless and until I get to a point where I really decide to learn everything I possibly can. And I'm of the belief that it's OK to not have an opinion on everything, and it's probably a good, it's a good thing to normalize, right? Normalize not having an opinion on everything, because most of us aren't experts in everything. So however, whenever I get remotely near the subject of vaccines or the subject of COVID on my podcast, I inevitably get really big reactions from my audience. And they're usually really polarized, very black and white, very two-dimensional. So I'm just going to address those listeners before I hear out what Dr. Andrew has to say, OK? Because I know you guys, and I know I have many wonderful people in my audience, but I also know what some of the the most outraged commentators have to say. And listen, guys, it's not black and white, OK? I talk about my long COVID on this podcast. And everyone is like, excuse me, not everyone, but a lot of commentators are either like, it's because the vaccine injured you. And I didn't even share if I got a vaccine or not. And then there's people saying, you don't have long COVID. That doesn't exist. It's like, OK, even if you don't think there's anything special about COVID, people have had post-viral conditions before COVID existed. I've met patients who have been sick for years following Epstein-Barr or what's that one, the kissing flu? I forgot what it's called. That is Epstein-Barr. Okay, thank you. You know, people, people want to reduce things and put you in a camp, they want to put you in a political camp and decide if they're for you or against you. And it's just not that simple. And so I'm going to hear what what Dr. I had to look at my notes to see how that's pronouncing it. But Dr. Zywiec has to say about this. And I'm not going to ask him every single question or give every single rebuttal that every single member of my audience wants to. Why? Because I'm not you. I'm me. I have my own perspective, my own knowledge base, and my own gaps in knowledge. And if you have a problem with that, you're listening to the wrong podcast. Now we're going to hear what he has to say. That was a serious disclaimer. I've been doing this for two years and I feel like I can anticipate, I can see the YouTube comments coming in whenever I'm going into a certain territory. I even gave a disclaimer on a recent podcast where my guest asked me a question. I was like, I know some of you guys are going to have a problem with me talking rather than just interviewing my guest. Let it be known that my guest asked me a question and that people still pounced on me for talking too much. So I'm like, it's my podcast. If you don't want to hear my ideas, go somewhere else. Anyway, Dr. Zivjats, please, let's talk about the subject of vaccines. Again, I'm not that informed or knowledgeable or opinionated. I have a friend who claims to be vaccine injured. I know people on both sides of the vaccines cause autism thing. And my understanding is like, it's the mercury. For the people who are making the claim, it's the fact that there's mercury, which is a neurotoxin that doesn't seem that far fetched to me. But go ahead and tell us what you know.
Andrew Zywiec: Okay, so I mean, this is, we would need a couple podcasts, and each of them would need to be several hours long. So I'll try to box this up and tie a bow on it as neatly as possible. First and foremost, what you said about, you know, you know, somebody who's vaccine injured, everybody likely knows somebody who's vaccine injured. First and foremost, any medical treatment comes with risks. every single medical treatment and every single medical treatment that is out there on the books has had severe problems in some patients. So there are vaccine injured people all over the place. So there was a very strange shift during COVID where it was like vaccines can't cause any harm. They can't do any damage. This is impossible. I don't know where that came from. It's a medical manipulation. It's a it's a it's a pharmaceutical agent. All pharmaceutical drugs have risks and benefits. And there is a you know, there's 10 pages of documentation on the adverse events of every medication and every vaccine out there. So first and foremost, people need to understand vaccine injury, whether you like it or not, is absolutely a thing. In fact, like I was talking about before, the DoD does, you know, research on all vaccine injuries that they that they use experimental shots on like our military, like the anthrax shot. And all of this is open source. There's no paywalls for this. People can look it up. But just to touch base on a little bit of vaccines in general, first and foremost, you look at something like hepatitis B shot. Hepatitis B is a virus that is transmitted through ejection drug use and through sexual intercourse with an infected party. They vaccinate babies at the day of birth, two months and six months for this virus. Obviously, babies are not at risk for obtaining this virus. So that's one initial question you ask yourself. And the second thing is, what does a vaccine do in general? Well, a vaccine irritates the immune system. That's the goal, right? It essentially presents itself as an infectious agent or a toxin, and it asks the immune system or pokes at it to try and get a response. Now, 80% of the immune system is in the GI tract. Babies don't have a developed gut microbiome yet. Babies don't have a good mucosal barrier yet due to the lack of a gut microbiome. And due to the fact that they haven't been feeding on real food or anything of that yet, they don't have a good IGA response yet, things of that nature. When you inflame the GI tract early on in life, you disrupt the tight junctions, you break the mucosal barrier, and you disrupt the gut microbiome development. Anybody that knows about the gut knows that a healthy gut translates to a lot of other things. A lot of neurotransmitters are made in the gut. A lot of the neural nervous system is connected from the gut to the brain. If you get a leaky gut, that allows for remember the inside of your GI tract is still the outside of your body. And I'll say that again for the audience because it sounds a little bit warped. The inside of your stomach and the inside of your GI tract is still the outside of your body. If you swallow a penny and it goes into your belly and then it goes into your bowels, it never enters your body. It just goes through you, right? So this tells you that that tube that is your GI tract is the great barrier between what gets into your blood and what stays out of your blood. right? And there's three major barriers in your body, the skin, the GI tract, and the lungs. Those are the three barriers that things need to break through to get into you. So in this GI tract, when you get a leaky gut, disrupted barriers, and a screwed up GI microbiome, you allow in large particles, small particles, all sorts of particles that should have never been in, then they get into the blood supply, They go through the liver, and then they hit the lungs, they hit the skin, they hit all the other organ systems, and they can continually cause immune processes and inflammation as well. Now, since the advent of vaccines, Not the advent, since they were heavily utilized, which is mostly in the 90s is when the vaccine schedule started picking up. And that's right after the liability shields in the 1980s. Since that time, we've seen skyrocketing rates of chronic variable immunodeficiency, myelodysplastic syndromes, asthma, eczema, atopy, all sorts of pediatric autoimmune conditions. And it translates. pretty directly and correlates pretty directly. And correlation is not causation, but correlation is the first thing that you see that prompts you to start investigating causation, right? There's never been a clinical trial that is double-blind and placebo-controlled on vaccines, and there's a reason for that, because they're not safe. There are a lot of toxic adjuvants in the vaccines. You said- Mercury. Aluminum or mercury. Oh, right.
Stephanie Winn: Aluminum too, right?
Andrew Zywiec: Now it's aluminum, they used it used to be mercury and mercury, the reason that they use this was, they said it was a preservative, and they couldn't take it out because they were using multi dose vials. And in order to do single dose, they would have in order to take out mercury, they'd have to convert it to single dose vials. And that would be wildly expensive. So they couldn't do that and so forth and so on. But one thing I one thing I'll say is aluminum is in the vaccines at very, very high levels. A toxic dose of aluminum is 100 micrograms per liter of blood. A baby has 60 to 7 milliliters per kilogram and is born at about 3 kilos. So a baby has around 250 to 300 milliliters of blood. A vaccine has between 350 and 700 micrograms of aluminum. This is around 9 to 30 times a toxic dose in the blood. We see in autistic patients and in Alzheimer's patients heavy aluminum deposition in the brain. How does aluminum get into the brain? Well, polysorbate increases permeability at the blood-brain barrier and has been utilized in research and pharmacy in order to get blood or drugs into the brain. Polysorbates are also in vaccines. There's a lot of There's a lot of research and a lot of things that point to the fact that vaccines are very, very problematic. So first and foremost, I would say that I encourage people to read more. I encourage people to read and look at the literature. Now, secondarily, we have 72 doses of vaccines on the pediatric vaccine schedule. 72 doses before the age of 18. They think that it is necessary to inject your baby from day one of life to 18 with 72 doses of toxins, literal toxins, to prime the immune system for the big fight? None of it makes any good sense. And I mean, you can read books like, I think Turtles All the Way Down is the one that a lot of people recommend, just to look at the fact that the research doesn't line up. It's all built on faulty premises. So in my opinion, I would never vaccinate anyone. I would never ask somebody to get vaccinated. I would never recommend that they get vaccinated. The human immune system is one of the most sophisticated and complex systems I've ever studied in my entire life. And the short-sightedness, the myopic view that somebody in a lab with a beaker can concoct some little toxin that is going to some way enhance the human body's immune system without causing any immune dysregulation or problems is very foolish and very arrogant.
Stephanie Winn: I'm going to comment on a couple of things you said, and then I'm going to play devil's advocate. To my audience, all this is coming from what I know and what I don't know. And if you only want to listen to people who are medical practitioners talk about these issues, definitely go listen to a medical practitioner interviewing another medical practitioner. But I'm interviewing you in this case as a layperson who's curious about these issues. And by the way, obviously, we're not going to be able to monetize this particular episode on YouTube, and that's going to be fine. I make like 20 bucks a month on YouTube anyway. It's fine. But what you were saying about the GI tract in babies, the gut microbiome, the hep B vaccine, that all made sense. And it also made me think about how more and more babies are born by cesarean as we have later maternal birth age and doctors trying to plan their vacations. And then we have the scandal of gender affirming care ruining women's vaginal plasticity. So women who have taken testosterone who are having babies, which is a new phenomenon, You know, they have to give birth by cesarean, of course. I was delivered by cesarean because my mother was advanced in age. And so as part of my understanding that, you know, one of the downsides of babies being born that way is that they don't get to pass through the vaginal canal and have the impact that that has on their gut microbiome. And then I think about, you know, you said IgA, and I don't even know what that is, but somehow I know it's in colostrum. And that may be because I take colostrum every day. But for those who aren't familiar, colostrum is an ingredient in milk, specifically the very first milk that a mother produces after a newborn. So I know that the colostrum that a mother produces for her baby is very important in shaping their immune system. The colostrum I take, of course, is for cows. But I was just able to connect those dots, that babies need They need to be born under the most ideal conditions and nurse under the most ideal conditions to help shape their fragile gut microbiome and then, you know, we know so many babies are not even being born under the most ideal conditions and of course, you know, all of those babies are just as valid and their mothers are doing their best as well. Not dissing families that have to make difficult decisions because they have some difficulty with vaginal birth or breastfeeding, but just to say that the early weeks of life are already such a fragile time, such an important time for establishing the bond between mother and child, for establishing the gut microbiome and the immune system and all these things. And so I'm just thinking about in that context, when you talk about, you know, why are these one day old babies being given the hep B vaccine if their risk of hep B at that stage of life is zero?
Andrew Zywiec: Yeah, so I mean, well, that's, that's, that's a million dollar question, right? Why is that the case? And I, I would venture to say that the case is, and the reason behind it is that they, they want to ensure that you never see a healthy baby for several months. That's the reason for giving vaccines at birth day of birth. You are already manipulating and modifying the immune system on the first day of life. That way, nothing will ever stick. You can't prove anything after that point. Vaccine injuries, the way that vaccine injuries are proved is temporal pattern, right? When you have a nine month old, or maybe not nine months, they don't get, they get blood work at nine months. So if you have, you know, if you have a, you know, a 12 month old that gets a vaccine, and they were walking and they were babbling or starting to speak, and then they get a vaccine and within 24 hours, they stop speaking, or they stop walking, or they have a, or they start getting chronic ear infections. That, you know, we attribute things in medicine to temporal patterns. What happened right before this, you know, what could have set this off? You know, and that's how, that's how most vaccine injury is established. You know, if somebody has a vaccine and has a seizure 10 minutes later, it's very unlikely that that seizure was going to happen. Otherwise, it's more likely that something that we did caused it. Right. So to be to be cynical about it, I believe that that's the reason why they vaccinate on day one. And you're right, if you if you notice what you what you just alluded to, is natural is the best way to have a to have a natural childbirth, It enables the baby to pick up microbes on the way out so that they can start to develop a microbiome. The contractions of the female through the vaginal canal increase the cortisol levels of the baby. The baby then has greater steroid levels which enhances the lungs. So there's reasons behind that. Breastfeeding. The baby is taking in bacteria from the nipple, and the baby is also getting colostrum, which is super nutrient-stensed, packed, produced specifically for the baby, and full of immunoglobulin A, which is actually the immune globulin, which is in the mucosal surfaces of your body that fights off all infections. Since they don't have a mucosal surface yet, the mom gives the IgA to the baby. So if you notice, everything you're alluding to is nature knows what it's doing far better than a doctor does. And that's the point I get to when I talk about the immune system. When I talk about the immune system and its complexity, I really mean that. The immune system is insanely complex. And to be humble, we must understand that we know so little that we don't even know what we know and don't know about the immune system. It is that big. It is that complicated. It's almost like neurological studies. We don't even know how a memory is encoded into the brain. Something that simple, we have no idea how that works. So when you get to the level of, listen, we understand a lot about the immune system, but our understanding of the global immune system is nothing. So thinking once again, that somebody is building vaccines in a lab that are going to correct or somehow enhance the human being is it's foolish. It really is.
Stephanie Winn: Okay, I'm going to play devil's advocate now because vaccines were invented for a reason. They were invented based on people dying in large numbers from epidemics that spread rapidly through populations for which there were no cures. So you said you would never recommend vaccines to anyone. Nope. What would a world without vaccines look like?
Andrew Zywiec: It would look a lot healthier. It would look a lot healthier.
Stephanie Winn: Would you at all be concerned about potential epidemics though?
Andrew Zywiec: Now with it now with that, so in in what we're talking about in this, so you're talking about, you know, epidemic sweeping the world and things like measles or the plague or things of that nature, or, you know, pox. Yeah. So, so here's the thing. The all of those were almost eradicated without vaccines. The number one thing that has completely shifted the number one and then you can look this up anywhere. The number one thing that has reduced infectious disease and death due to infectious disease is handwashing. And what's interesting about that, by the way, is the person in it was in the 1800s, I can't remember his name, but the person who pointed out that doctors should wash their hands in between patients was put in a psychiatric asylum.
Stephanie Winn: I remember hearing that story.
Andrew Zywiec: So first and foremost, I'll say that handwashing, indoor plumbing, and just general hygiene practices all around have completely shifted. Now, another thing that was developed, or not developed, another thing that was naturally found was antibiotics. So during this time when vaccines came out, Also, everybody started washing their hands, everything was becoming super hygienic, all the plumbing and sewage was getting corrected, and antibiotics were also found. All at the same time. And our understanding of how to treat things also became more and more enhanced over the years. You know, when we talk about things like measles, It's now, it's measles is what now people are talking about as the, you know, something like the chickenpox. Everybody had chickenpox when I was a child. I mean, very few, some people will obviously die. People die from everything. People die from the flu. People die from pneumonia. These things happen every year. But very few people pass away from something like the chickenpox. That's the same story with the measles. Very few people pass away from the measles. If treated correctly and promptly, the measles doesn't cause some, you know, some, some massive death in the population. That's just not, it's just not something that's true. A lot of what vaccines have been founded on is fear mongering. If you don't do, it's almost like the vac, it's almost like gender affirming care. If you don't do this. patient will do this. If you don't do A, patient will commit suicide. If you don't get this shot, you will contract the measles and die. It's a fear tactic, and it's not rooted in reality. It just isn't. And again, if you look at the timelines of all of these diseases being wiped off the map, you start to get a better picture of why those things were actually happening. And furthermore, one other thing I will tell you is diseases, they don't get eradicated. That's a fallacy. you don't eradicate a microbe off the face of the planet. That's not something that we have the capability of doing. You can't eradicate a disease off the face of the earth. Even things like herd immunity, that's not a possible thing to prove. You can't prove that a population at a certain vaccination amount is going to have herd immunity to something that's ubiquitous in the environment. And if somebody does ever write a research designed to prove something like that, they'll probably win a Nobel Prize. But those are the kind of things I would look at when talking about the vaccines, is that the immune system knows how to fight something far better than we do.
Stephanie Winn: Speaking of hygiene as a measure for managing infectious diseases, that reminds me of 2020 and 2021, the grocery stores with the arrows on the ground and, you know, masking and six feet of distance. And, you know, you can you can catch the disease when you're walking to the bathroom, but not when you're sitting at the table being served. I know that you're willing to go there with COVID. I've expressed I'm hesitant to talk about COVID because as I said earlier in this episode, I have long COVID. And whenever I talk about it, people want to offer their unsolicited opinions.
Andrew Zywiec: You're going to have a really interesting comment section after this whole conversation.
Stephanie Winn: But that said, I am so curious for your thoughts on how COVID has been handled. I mean, there's been a lot of arguing about how serious a condition it was. And you said people die of all these different things. And we were talking about how people have post-viral conditions from all these different things. There's been a lot of arguing over how big of a deal COVID really is. And I feel so caught in the middle and politically homeless with regard to that. Because I'm like, in my life, it's a really freaking big deal. In my life, it feels like it's permanently altered the trajectory of my life. It certainly cost me tens of thousands of dollars and made me pretty freaking miserable. But that being said, do I have enough information to think, to have a stance either way on whether our response to COVID was too aggressive or not aggressive enough? It certainly seemed like, you know, there's a lot of authoritarianism that took place under the guise of managing COVID. So, you know, it's, again, one of those things that I don't have a strong opinion on, and I can see where a lot of different people are coming from on this issue. Yeah, it was a really big deal in my life. But at the same time, I've known people who had a really similar post-viral condition to my long COVID. I've known people who had that from something like mononucleosis. And we didn't handle mono that way. We didn't handle any other virus that way. It's just something that, unfortunately, has negatively impacted some people. And life moves on for everyone else. So go ahead. Tell us what you think.
Andrew Zywiec: There's so much that we can that we could kind of discuss and unpack. But again, I'll try.
Stephanie Winn: Maybe it's not. Maybe it's unfair to ask you all these things in one podcast.
Andrew Zywiec: No, I mean, we can. Yeah, we might have to unpack more of it at a later date. But I guess I'll begin by saying that what you said is probably the most appropriate thing. Under the guise of managing COVID, a lot of things were carried out to remove free speech, to remove rights and to implement a more totalitarian system. Government always marches forward. Right. And especially like totalitarian style and rights. It is it is very difficult to get rights back once you lose them. Right. So this is the machine essentially moving forward. But in terms of particularly what's going on with covid in this response, the response was was absolutely ridiculous on many levels. For instance, you know, after the first six months of covid, it showed that there was a nine around a ninety eight or ninety nine percent recovery rate with no problems. Right, so not not a whole lot of problems. And then the people who were having issues were either immunocompromised or elderly with a lot of comorbidities. All right, so we knew what population it was going to affect.
Stephanie Winn: Wait, can I can I pause you there and ask you a question? 98 or 99% recovery. So it's my understanding that about one in 10 people who gets infected with COVID ends up with some form of long COVID. Is that
Andrew Zywiec: That'd be a difficult statistic to confirm. Now at this point, I don't know where we're at. I don't know exactly where we're at, but I'm talking about the first six months. So in that period, because now a lot of people have been infected, reinfected, vaccinated. Shedding is actually real. And we could discuss about that in a second. That's not that's. And by the way, shedding is not just from a covid vaccine. Shedding is real of other vaccines. If you get an MMR vaccine, you are supposed to stay away from immunocompromised individuals for six weeks because your vaccine could shed onto them and then they could serial convert.
Stephanie Winn: So sorry, how does that work?
Andrew Zywiec: Shedding, remember you off gas and you shed a lot of things and a lot of toxins out of your body. You could be shedding it through respiratory, you could be sweating it through, shedding it through fluids. I don't know that they've pinpointed exactly how it occurs. But the idea is that even if you get vaccinated with say something like a live vaccine, you are not supposed to be around immunocompromised people for up to six weeks in close proximity, because you could shed onto them and then they could get infected. So that's to say that it's not just COVID shedding that happens, it's other things in particular. And there's people that specialize that know a lot more about that particular topic than I do. But apart from that, when we're talking about the So in that first six months, we knew who it was affecting and we knew who it wasn't affecting. So that's the first thing. The second thing is masks. Surgical masks, look, surgical masks are like they're mesh, they're like a net, right? The masks have windows of about 100 microns diagonally, right? The COVID particle with all of its components is around seven microns. Seven microns can easily pass through 100 microns, right? So, I'm sorry, nanometers, nanometers, not microns. think. Anyways, the masks were completely foolish. Masking children was a problem. Little kids are learning emotional cues. They're learning context. They're learning facial expressions. They're learning how to listen. They're learning how to talk. And how they talk is about how they listen. So if you muffle their language, If you mask their face so they can't see expressions, you get emotional blunting, you get neurocognitive developmental delays, you get speech problems, you get focus issues, all sorts of problems with that. Removing them from schools just compounded that. And that's in the younger groups. In the older groups, socially isolating people proved to have massive problems with anxiety, depression, all of those kind of profiles skyrocketed. And by the way, these were all predictable. I know that because I told everyone about these things on the first day that they're implementing them. And I, we have all the receipt, I have all the receipts. As I was a practicing physician in pediatric medicine, explaining that these are the problems that are going to arise because of this. And you can, like you said, you could sit down, take your mask off and eat, stand up, you got to put your mask back on. The virus is ubiquitous in the atmosphere. It's not moving around at different elevations and in different locations. Now, six feet social distancing. Droplet particles are supposed to drop after around three to four feet. So if you're speaking to somebody you're coughing or sneezing, maybe maybe in some weird way that that could have some utility, forcing an entire population to six feet social distance that it's it's it's insanity. Right. And then again, forcing pregnant women and children to get vaccinated with an experimental shot. And we can discuss a lot of the problems with the vaccine itself. We can discuss a lot of the research behind spike protein. Spike protein is known to cause clots, to activate the clotting cascade. It's known to cause inflammation. It's known to cause misfolding of other proteins, which is called prionopathy. Prionopathy leads to neurological disease. It's known to deposit in reproductive tissues and bone marrow. It's known to cause immunosuppression. These are all known things, but they injected it anyway. When you look at the mRNA platform, it is very, very similar to just any virus, right? Normally what they do is they give you a little bit of a dead virus or a little piece of a virus or a little piece of a protein. They gave a full sequence For a full protein, that's a toxin. So the mRNA that gets inside of your body has something, they added something called N1-methyl pseudouridine instead of the normal natural uridine. That structure stops the mRNA from being able to be broken down by the natural mRNA enzymes. So that means it gets into cells. via the lipid nanoparticle, which doesn't discriminate, right? It's a, it's a fatty, it's a fatty layer, which just absorbs and fuses into any fatty layer of any cell. So it can dump this mRNA into any cell. The mRNA then can't be broken down because the N1 methyl pseudouridine, and then the mRNA perpetually creates spike protein, which either leaves the cell via exocytosis or builds up so big that the cell ruptures and releases all the spike protein. And then the spike protein does all the things that we know it's supposed to do. It causes clotting and causes prionopathy and it causes immune dysfunction and all sorts of other things while causing the immune system to respond. Now, all of that's problematic. Essentially, that's like injecting somebody with HIV. The whole scenario is a problem. And then we can talk about PCR. I worked with PCR heavily. I've done PCR an endless amount of times. PCR is only to figure out if something is there. right? If you have if COVID is ubiquitous, and we're all breathing it in, then it's in our nose, it's in our throat, it's in our oral pharynx, it's going to be there. If you swab it and swipe it and run enough cycles of a PCR, then you will amplify it enough times to where it's detectable. If you amplify two strands of DNA 30 times, you are already into billions of strands of DNA 30 times. So if you run the threshold cycle to 40, hundreds of trillions, and you can map and you will you'll detect it anywhere. So the PCR was was not a valid approach to diagnosing an illness. It was a valid approach to see if somebody is inoculated. But inoculation doesn't mean diseased. 30% of people have MRSA in their nose. You've heard of MRSA infections, right? 30% of people have MRSA inoculation in their nose. 30% of people aren't sick with MRSA. That just happens to be in their microbiome. You know, you could swab a desk for COVID during the pandemic, and it would have tested positive.
Stephanie Winn: So part of the problem with the COVID vaccine, the mRNA vaccine, is that it contained the spike protein, which is itself damaging.
Andrew Zywiec: Yes, and known to be damaging.
Stephanie Winn: And what is your theory about why some people end up with long COVID? Because I've heard people argue about whether there's viral persistence with the clotting. I had elevated D-dimer. Now I don't. I've had tests. I mean, you don't have to give me personal medical advice. I, for a while, thought I had mitochondrial issues. I was taking all these mitochondrial supports and I got a test that found that my mitochondria looked pretty good. And I was like, is that because the mitochondrial support I've done is working or because I never had a problem with my mitochondria? I still feel like my cells aren't generating enough energy. Do you have any particular theory about the mechanism of why people get stuck with long COVID?
Andrew Zywiec: I think that it's good to take a holistic viewpoint of a lot of different things that might be leading to this. First and foremost, I would say everybody's different. Everybody has different predispositions. Not everybody that is infected is infected in the same amount, which means the viral load that they were inoculated with One might be heavier than another. Your immunocompetence at the time that you were infected, were you co-infected with anything else? Did you have a latent Epstein-Barr virus? Did you have some other immunocompromised? Did you have predisposition to autoimmune disease in your family? So all of those things will play a role. How were you infected? Were you infected with COVID in the air? Or did you get the vaccine, which is COVID in a needle, right? So did the did the infection have to go through your lungs in order to get there, where it had to face the immune system head on immediately? Did it did it wind up in your GI tract where it had to face your immune system? Or was it injected into your muscle where it got right into the bloodstream? and could cause different problems and could react differently. Then again, where did it infect if it got into your lungs, it's a different than getting into your shoulder. And then where does it travel from there. So there's there's a lot of different things out there that could that could kind of help you tease out why some people got long COVID over some other people. Here's here's the thing. If you give 50 people pneumonia, 50 people are gonna have 50 different courses. Some people are gonna shake it off and never have a symptom. You're inoculated with viruses and bacteria every day of your life. Some people get sick, some people don't. There's a hundred different reasons from a scientific standpoint on why that happens. So I wouldn't hazard to say I have like a very specific reason why. I would say that there are an immense amount of things to look at. And that's the whole, That's the whole purpose of being a research scientist. A lot of doctors, they're doctors, but they're not researchers. They're not scientists. So they look at everything through just a purely medical lens, a clinical lens. Everything that you have to look at about the whys is all kind of subclinical. It's not what you see. It's what's going on behind the scenes.
Stephanie Winn: How hopeful do you feel about the ability of people to recover from long COVID or the ability of the medical community to find solutions for these complex problems?
Andrew Zywiec: I will say that I am going to try and be optimistic. With that being said, you can't fix a problem until you're willing to address it. And a lot of people are still not willing to address a lot of things. As you said, you know, some people will. Some people say long COVID is not real. Some people say vaccine injury is not real. Long COVID exists. Vaccine injury exists. They both exist, but they don't necessarily have to be mutually exclusive or completely separated. These all things are existing today in what we're fighting. And until the medical establishment kind of sets its sights on correcting this, which good luck because it's a big mistake and a lot of people are not willing to step forward and start to tackle this problem. So the longer we're waiting and the less eyes and ears and minds we have approaching this, the less beneficial it's going to be. As this draws out longer and longer and longer, the worse it gets, right? You know, so COVID causes chronic inflammation, right? Chronic inflammation causes immunofatigue. Immunofatigue causes infection and damage to opportunistic infections and all sorts of other bodily processes that won't function correctly. And there's a lot of pathways we can discuss about illnesses, chronic illnesses that have arised since COVID. So until these things get addressed, until people are willing to look at them, we have a big problem on our hands.
Stephanie Winn: Are you looking to launch a podcast, but find yourself overwhelmed by the technical details? Or perhaps you've already gotten started podcasting, but you struggle to keep up with the parts that aren't fun? Well, my very own podcast producer can help. Nick can provide whichever services you need in order to focus on what matters most, your content. Whichever parts of the production process you find daunting, he can help you strategize or take them off your shoulders altogether. Whether your podcast includes video or just audio, whether you need someone to write your show notes and make clips for social media, or you just want your sound cleaned up a bit, Nick is your all-in-one podcast partner. His end-to-end service adapts to your unique needs, ensuring your podcast looks and sounds professional and polished. Let him sweat the technical details so you can relax behind the mic. Visit podsbynick.com to set up a free discovery call. We've covered a lot of ground and I realize several of the questions I asked you today could, you know, they could be their whole own episodes. Yeah. But, you know, I think I want to maybe close by asking about what you think a holistic approach to gender dysphoria might look like. I mean, I dispute the definition of the diagnosis, but setting aside my complaints about how it's worded, just knowing that this is a problem, I have my opinions as a mental health professional, And I also have my opinions about medical stuff, which is not my area of expertise, just an area of interest. Like, I'm really interested in endocrine-disrupting chemicals and the environment. I'm currently in the process of overhauling my wardrobe so that I'm not exposing myself to, you know, plastic-based endocrine-disrupting chemicals on my skin every day. And I think that's an issue people aren't talking about enough. You know, declining fertility, increasing endocrine disorders. And when I try to talk about this issue of endocrine disorders and endocrine disrupting chemicals, I think there's a lot of resistance in the gender critical community to exploring that. And if I had to make a guess as to why, just based on the things I've bumped up against, it seems like the underlying logic is if we take a moment to acknowledge that there could be any biological basis whatsoever for the claims some people make that they don't feel entirely like a boy or a girl or what have you, that they feel a different gender, you know, if you give that any material credibility, then then now all bets are off and the kids are going to feel more justified in their demands for these poisonous chemicals. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. No, let's separate things out. We know about things like phthalates and PCBs and how the anal genital distance in a baby can be a reliable predictor of whether they're going to have autism. I mean, all these things are obviously connected, right? It's the autistic kids who are vulnerable to the gender stuff. Aren't they also the ones affected by endocrine disrupting chemicals? This is not some cuckoo stuff, okay? This is like known science to my listeners who are like, what the hell is she talking about? Okay, just look up Dr. Shanna Swan. But here I am talking to a medical doctor, so he's gonna correct me if there's anything I got wrong. Here's my point. We know that, you know, we see lots of PCOS in young women now. We see people with fertility issues happening earlier in life now. We know testosterone and sperm counts have declined a lot. Like, this is all known, right? And I don't think that it necessarily follows that if we agree to talk about this issue in the gender-critical community, that it means that we are endorsing gender ideology, that it means that we are saying, oh yeah, fine, there's a biological basis for their gender dysphoria, and now that means proceed with all these things. It's like, no, it can still be a social contagion. It can still be, you know, even coming down, coming from some top-down agenda that we don't even fully understand, some transhumanist lobby. It can still be spreading through social media. It can still be every complaint we have about it, regressive and reductionistic and, We can still have all those same complaints and also acknowledge that possibly this young person who's saying, I don't completely feel like a girl or whatever. might have something going on a little different with her endocrine system, that there could be maybe a biological basis for her feeling that way now. And now what does that mean in terms of treatment pathway is a different question, right? Like maybe her own natal sex hormones are in some kind of imbalance. And this is just stuff that I think about a lot, and I don't have that many people to talk to. And here you are, a gender critical doctor. And I want to know what you think about my ideas, what you think we ought to be doing about these these kids and young people.
Andrew Zywiec: So I think a lot of a lot of what you said is correct. It needs to be viewed in a very holistic way. And I think that you you hit on something that is important. If there is some kind of biological basis for any of this, it's going to oh, no, it'll give credence to what they're saying. And it's going to you know, it's going to be a staple in their movement. And no, we need to get to the truth. We need to get to the truth of what's happening. This is about the patient, and obviously there are a lot of patients that are being taken extreme advantage of, and their lives are being disrupted and destroyed. I've spoken to a lot of detransitioners in specifically pediatric medicine, and it's so profoundly sad to see what's happened with these individuals' lives. So, I think that it does need to be taken in so far as a holistic approach. Now, I think You know, looking at what's going on in their food, what's going on with possibly endocrine disrupting chemicals. We know that phytoestrogens and that there's all sorts of problems. We know that the fertility rates are being driven in part by by food and toxic chemicals. We know that a big problem that is arising is SSRIs, SNRIs, anti-anxiety meds, anxiolytics, antipsychotics being utilized for all of these issues as well. We know that that is a driving cause. We know that almost all of these patients, gender dysphoria does not exist in a vacuum. It's a trauma response. So anxiety, depression, PTSD, history of sexual trauma or abuse, those things need to be heavily addressed. And like I said, I see a lot of gender dysphoria as a trauma outlet, right? Which is why you said, you know, once they do one thing, they have to jump to the next. You know, once they get a mastectomy, that's not good enough. Then they have to get bottom surgery. Once they get bottom surgery, there will be something after that. It's not going to, the buck won't stop there, right? I think that, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy and getting to the root of why they're feeling the way they're feeling is the most important aspect over all other things. Believe it or not, obviously social media plays a huge role in social contagion. And we've seen that in the history of medicine for a long time. Look, it happened in the 1990s. anorexia. Celebrities pushed it. It was pushed in movies. It was pushed on the big screen. It was popularized. Who did it affect? It affected children, because children are at a greater predisposition for having those problems, and especially young females. right? With body dysmorphia and things of that nature, they're at a higher risk profile for these kinds of things. So there's a lot of different things that we can do, but I think that we have to root it in being honest and being truthful. And that starts with having difficult discussions, difficult conversations. And it's really hard to pry things out of a teenager. They don't want to talk about their emotions. They don't want to talk about the way they feel. They don't But the point is, it's better to have uncomfortable conversations and it's better to face the truth head on than having children who are willing to put themselves on dangerous drugs and go through severely disturbed mutilation procedures in order to be something that they can never be. I think that we have to really start aggressively approaching this because every day that we do not tackle this, hundreds of more children are falling victim into this into this cult like ideology, and they're harming themselves for the rest of their lives. And, you know, a lot of people are afraid of fear and backlash, they're going to be called a racist or a bigot or or this or that. It doesn't matter. It's a name. We're not in eighth grade where we can utilize that as an excuse to not do something about this. There are children that are directly in harm's way. And what this is ushering in, this might be a little bit too touchy for your show, is that it's ushering the way into pedophilia and into all sorts of other issues. Right? And it needs to be squashed. It needs to be completely extinguished. So anything that we can do, we should be doing.
Stephanie Winn: Yeah, no, that's that's not too edgy. I mean, we we do talk about the grooming and the pipeline and the, you know, predatory aspect to all this. And you know, why on earth are there adults who want to keep kids in a, you know, prepubescent state and all of that kind of stuff is valid questions to be asking. I mean, anecdotally, from my position, it sure seems like… I mean, I don't remember hearing about PCOS when I was younger, polycystic ovarian syndrome. And now, I feel like in the last decade, at the same time as I witnessed that exponential rise in so-called gender dysphoria, I feel like I was hearing more and more about PCOS, which is an endocrine disorder. And, you know, we know that the same, you know, plastic-based chemicals that can cause endocrine disorders are also implicated in autism. And we know it's the autistic kids who are falling into this gender stuff, right? And then we also just, I mean, think about, okay, to my average listener in their 40s, 50s, 60s, think about how horny you were when you were like 18, right? How old these kids are. Sorry to be crude, but I think there's such a failure of empathy to put ourselves in their shoes and compare and contrast sometimes. Think about all these young people claiming to be asexual now and young men having no drive. When you think about how young men have felt in the past where their drive compelled them to do either great things or crazy things. I mean, how can we not look at the possible role of some kind of endocrine wackiness here when you just consider all these data points of things that are different with the younger generations. And it's intergenerational too, right? I mean, some of these endocrine disrupting chemicals are passed down through the womb, aren't they? And like epigenetic changes, I believe.
Andrew Zywiec: I might not be the best person to ask about those things.
Stephanie Winn: You seem very knowledgeable in any case, but maybe you're not super dug into that.
Andrew Zywiec: On this particular topic, my focus on a lot of what's going on with decreasing fertility, sex drive, all of those things, I've been heavily focused on psychotropic medications more than anything else. Once we did discuss things like phytoestrogens, toxic microplastics, things like that, that's a whole other universe of it. And that's what I mean. It needs to be tackled from every different angle. And that's the reason why there are specialists in a lot of these other specialties.
Stephanie Winn: Well, and if we do talk again, I think that'd be a great thing for me to ask you some more about. I've talked about with Dr. Yosef Witt-During, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. And our original intention for that podcast was to talk about post-SSRI sexual dysfunction, and then I discovered he was just so knowledgeable. Okay. I mean, he was just so knowledgeable about so many things related to adverse reactions to psychiatric drugs and tapering safely, which is what he specializes in. He specializes in helping people get off psychiatric drugs. He and his wife at the Witt-During clinic that they run together. So I talked with him about that, but it was pretty broad. I also talked about with Taylor Murphy, who's a de-sister, she had gender dysphoria. And for her, it was tied back to SSRIs and birth control. And I talk about that pipeline a lot on this podcast, because as a therapist, I just saw so many young women getting put on antidepressants and birth control both within a year of Menarche and then presenting for therapy 10 years later like, well, I'm just an anxious, depressed person. That's just who I am, I guess. I don't really know myself. So I just saw so much of that in therapy. And I think we've covered so much ground at this point that it's almost unfair to ask you to say anything about SSRIs because I know if we were to open up that topic again, it would be one of those things you could talk about for hours. I'm just going to mentally bookmark that. At some point, we might have you back on to talk about your perspective on the problems with SSRIs. Is there anything just briefly that you wanted to say to clarify your perspective on that, even though we're not going to go through a lot today?
Andrew Zywiec: Yeah. Actually, that's one of the things that I focus on in medicine as well, is actually getting people off of things like SSRIs and the sexual dysfunction and a lot of the problems that come along with it. a lot of the emotional inability to process basically anything in their lives. There's so much to be said about living a life without these medications. And the OCPs is another huge problem. OCPs? Oral contraception, progesterone, estrogen, all that. Look, it's They are putting young women on, or young girls rather, on all of these medications right when they hit puberty because they're saying, oh, it's going to normalize out your cycle. You know what else will normalize out their cycle? Time. Time will normalize out their cycle. Make sure they're eating right. Make sure they have proper nutrition. Make sure that they're getting all of the support that they need during that time, but do not give them hormones. Once you disrupt the endocrine pathways, you disrupt a whole bunch of neural cognition and emotional limbic system issues along the lines. Now, again, I find a lot of those medications to be highly problematic. And a lot of women will tell you that once they came off their oral contraceptives, they were wildly emotional. They had drastic reactions to coming off. That's called withdrawal. Because then once you come off of it, you go, it's the same thing with SSRIs, electric lightning bolt, like shocks, like crying for no reason, all sorts, just really off the wall kind of stuff. And then they think, oh my gosh, something is really wrong with me. I have to go back on that medication. No, nothing's wrong with you. The medication and the withdrawal is causing that. You need to stay off of it. We need to taper you down and get you off of these kind of things so that your system can reboot and kind of correct itself. The one thing I'll land on is that the human body is the most sophisticated healing machine on the face of this planet. It's what it's designed to do. If you don't believe me, go get a paper cut and watch what happens. Your body will naturally heal anything to the best of its abilities. And we need to promote that over everything else.
Stephanie Winn: Well, I'll definitely have to have you back some other time to maybe go into greater detail on it. And just for our audience's context. Sometimes when I have people on these shows, I've talked to them before. Or I've, you know, like in the case of Leonard Sacks, I read all four of his books before he came on my podcast. You know, in the context of our conversation today, this is really just our first time talking ever. And I think we did a pretty good job for our first conversation. We covered so much ground. Again, I feel like it was almost unfair to you, given how vast your knowledge is of each of these topics, to try to condense so much. So just going to bookmark that I'm really glad that you help people come off of psychiatric meds, and that you're raising awareness about these issues because I definitely share those concerns, you know, not to say that I'm in any position to say that there's never any utility for these drugs as someone who doesn't even have a license to prescribe them. But I definitely have concerns about, you know, at least speaking within my domain, you know, I have concerns about what it does to people psychologically to have these powerful drugs affecting their libido, even affecting who they're attracted to, affecting their sense of who they are as a person, their identity, all these kind of things. you know, giving these drugs to young people during critical developmental windows. I have some serious concerns about that. And, you know, like, like Taylor Murphy has expressed in our conversation on my podcast, as well as on X, that, you know, you can't just take these things away from a young woman while she's developing and then be surprised when she says, I don't completely feel like a girl or something like that. So I'm really glad that you're doing that work, and I'd love to talk to you again about it. And we covered so much ground today. Thank you again. So now's the part where we talk about where people can find you. So again, your name is Dr. Andrew Zivjets, but that is spelled, for those who are looking for you, and of course, it'll be the title in the show notes, but it's spelled Z-Y-W-I-E-C, just in case anyone wants to look you up. So where else can people find you?
Andrew Zywiec: You can find me on Twitter. It's the easiest place. AndrewJivjetzMD, my website for consultation or for appointments. I do a lot of telehealth nowadays. That's become all the rage. I prefer inpatient things, but we are living in the new world. So jivjetzinporter.com. And apart from that, I think those are the only two places that I'm really active.
Stephanie Winn: And are you able to see patients in Florida, or do you see patients around the country?
Andrew Zywiec: I do telehealth in all 50 states, yeah.
Stephanie Winn: OK, so if anyone is looking for a doctor who can help with things like coming off of SSRIs or vaccine injuries, anything else you want to say about what type of patients you like to help?
Andrew Zywiec: Yeah, actually, I mean, those are the two. largest points that I work with. Mostly though, anybody who wants holistic care, anybody who wants solid, honest education on medicine and their health and what to do moving forward. I know a lot of people out there don't have a lot of faith or trust in the system, rightly so. I lost all of my faith in the system over the last several years and I'm just striving to provide people with an alternative to that machine.
Stephanie Winn: And let me just ask you, I meant to ask this more directly earlier on, but as we're wrapping up, too, what advice would you have for the concerned parents in my audience who have teens and 20-somethings who are confused about what sex they are? When these concerned parents are looking for a doctor they can actually trust with their kid, to be honest with them, what advice would you give about where to find such a professional?
Andrew Zywiec: My first advice is this, remember that this is your family, these are your loved ones. You are allowed to ask all the questions in the world and that whoever you go to, that person works for you. Finding a good doctor, and a lot of people in the COVID space actually ask me that exact same question. I tell them, ask difficult questions right out of the gate. Do you support gender affirming care in minors? If they do, that's not the doctor for you. Do you support the mask mandates and forced vaccinations and kicking people out of your clinic if they don't want to be vaxxed? If they say yes, then that's not the doctor for you. And people think that it might be rude to ask these kinds of questions. It's your health. It's your life that you're placing in these people's hands. You should know who your doctor is. I'm on a pretty extreme level with being very open about my practice and where I stand on certain things, because then we have an understanding between myself and the patient and what we both view as the goal moving forward. So those are the first things I would start. Also, I would start with researching outside of the big systems. Unfortunately, that's not a likely place where you're going to find physicians who are willing to work with you. Even the even doctors that are against shots are still giving shots and they're whispering about being against the shots. Doctors that work for almost all major hospitals are in support of gender affirming care, or they're standing silent and silence is complicity. We're talking about children who are undergoing a magnificent amount of harm that defies and flies in the face of every aspect of medical ethics and is actually destroying their lives. I would stay far away from that system. So those are the things. Empower yourself as the patient. It's the same thing I tell patients that come in with mental health issues like depression and anxiety. You empower patients. You empower them to take charge of their health, to take charge of their future. What medicine has done for far too long is disempower the patient. by de-incentivizing taking any responsibility and de-incentivizing them taking an actual role in their own health. And I think that that's where we need to start. And that begins with the patient actually being a little bit more assertive.
Stephanie Winn: Thank you so much for that excellent answer here at the end. It's been a pleasure having you. I hope you enjoyed this episode of You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist podcast. To check out my book recommendations, articles, wellness products, guest episodes on other podcasts, consulting services, and lots more, visit SomeTherapist.com or follow me on Twitter or Instagram at SomeTherapist. If you'd like to go deeper, join my community at somekindoftherapist.locals.com. Members can dialogue with other listeners, post questions for upcoming podcast guests to respond to, or ask questions for me to respond to in exclusive members-only Q&A live streams. To learn more about the gender crisis, watch our film, No Way Back, The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care, at nowaybackfilm.com. Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our theme song, Half Awake. If you appreciate this podcast and want more people to find it, kindly take a moment to rate, review, like, comment, and share on your platforms of choice. Of course, just because I am some therapist doesn't mean I'm your therapist. This podcast is not a substitute for medical advice. If you need help, ask your doctor or browse your local therapists online. And whatever you do next, please take care of yourself. Eat well, sleep well, move your body, get outside, and tell someone you love them. You're worth it.